Smartphones have become the center of most everyone’s life. They are where we store all of our most important information and the sole way we contact one another. We even use smartphones to do a good portion of our web surfing. That is why it is so important for businesses to monopolize on mobile. Facebook is doing this by integrating its messenger app with SMS in order to get more people focused on using their services. This feature change means you’ll have even more opportunities for text marketing to your consumers.
Facebook app change
Facebook has tried to integrate their Messenger app and SMS in the past, but it didn’t quite take at the time. Since people have become more focused on mobile in the last year or two, Facebook believes it is a change that its users will welcome. The other new feature that will come with this change it the ability to switch between users in the Messenger app, which means that people who use the same phone (such as parents and kids) can easily switch between accounts. According to Engadget, these features are currently in a testing phase, but they will hopefully be released to users soon. Facebook has already integrated features into Messenger to allow payment transfers and even lets you ask for Uber rides, so additional modern changes to the system were bound to come soon.
What this means for you
Some people don’t think this will really affect them much, but being able to see all text-like messages in one place is a big deal, especially for businesses. As a business, people will reach out to you in a lot of different ways, but the two most common ways are through text (if enabled) and through Facebook messages. For the person responsible for receiving and answering these messages, it will save a lot of time to be able to see them all and respond to them all in one place. Though hopefully an automated text system will answer most of the questions for you, texting is a powerful tool to communicate with your customers, and those who know it is available to them will use it for all of their questions and concerns.
The other great feature is the ability to switch between accounts. Engadget points out that not a lot of people share their phones, but there are a lot of parents who let their kids use their phones because the kids don’t have their own yet. It would be nice to be able to switch between accounts just for this purpose. From a business perspective, it is really helpful to be able to go back and forth between a personal account and a business account. Most people who have business phones use them for personal and business purposes, and this change makes it easier to respond quickly to customers who have filed complaints through the Facebook Messenger app. Facebook is making a smart move with these changes, and your business may see the benefits more than you expected.
Source: Engadget
